Urban Futures

The CISSC Urban Futures working group is geared towards facilitating dialogue and exchanges on research, creative, and pedagogical engagements with cities. The aims of this working group are to create a space for bringing together faculty, artists and researchers, as well as graduate students, whose research and practice is tethered to urban issues writ large, including: sustainability, arts and culture, architecture and design, and themes such as resilience, reconciliation, migration and urban transformation, the right to the city, media ecology, queer urbanisms, environmental humanism, citying, futuricity, and more. The literature on these topics is broad, but what is relatively new is a shift in thinking about urban futures across disciplines (arts, business, social sciences) on these topics. CISSC Urban Futures working group will undertake a rigorous exploration of possible urban futures through cross-disciplinary collaborative research strategies and embedded and embodied urban explorations.

Our core team will share the facilitation of this working group and its activities. Our aim is to create mutually supporting structures (of which the working group is one) that will create a complex scaffold for advanced investigations concerning the urban fabric—its flows, resistances, and resiliencies—and ideas of futurism, speculative design, and fabulist site specific practice. The research and practice scaffold is not only intellectual but has a physical dimension as well: the nascent Institute for Urban Futures—which will be significantly formed and fed through the work of the Urban Futures working group in the next year—has an HQ in the new cooperative space Temps Libre located in the heart of the Mile-End neighbourhood. We anticipate that many of the events, gatherings, exhibitions, walks, documents, performances, and urban interventions emerging from the Urban Futures working group will be staged from this site as well as from the downtown campus of Concordia.

Some core critical questions guiding this working group (to be developed) include:

What does the preoccupation with creative and smart cities, and the role of art and technology in reimagining sustainable urban futures and resilient cities obscure about the urban sites in question?

How can universities help citizens develop a heightened awareness of environmental change issues through design and community engagement?

How might an Institute for Urban Futures be constructed along horizontal lines, emphasize consultation, collectively-define issues of urban urgency, and facilitate inclusive outcomes?

How can dialogues about the future of urban space make room for heterogeneous perspectives and knowledges about the city, especially those of children, citizens without domiciles, the urban poor, elders, and indigenous peoples?

What can we learn about urban speculations by looking at radical ideas about “the future” as they now exist in the past? (Expo ’67, for example.)

How can art, design, and performance radically sensualise our encounters with the city’s sonic, olfactory, and haptic dimensions so that we might boldly include these elements in our speculative designs for the future?

Linnaea Tillett
Friday, November 18, 2016
1:30-3:30pm, EV 7.735

Dr. Linnaea Tillett is founder and principal of Tillett Lighting Design Associates, New York. Tillett has worked with some of the world's foremost architects and artists on lighting design in public, private, and museal space. Her firm's approach is informed by her research in environmental psychology, and her respect for the delicate ecology of the night, which includes many light-sensitive flora and fauna. While responding to human need for illumination, her firm takes the stance that, when lighting the night, less is poetically, environmentally, and emotionally, more.

Invisible City

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

18h00-20h00
D.B. Clarke Theatre

Dijana Milosevic, founder and director of DAH Theatre Research Centre in Belgrade, will be giving a public artist talk about her internationally renowned activist site-based theatre project In/Visible City. The talk will be moderated by Dr. Shauna Jansen, Department of Theatre, Concordia University. This event is wheelchair accessible.